Judging a person's Perl skills by how s/he spells it is overly simplistic.

I'd never judge a person's skills by how they spell the language.
However, it's a useful clue about how useful they will be to me, which is
a lot more than just their skill from having studied the book.

Most of what I do when I program isn't about remembering the technical things about Perl. It's about finding answers to the things that aren't just
about the language, like is there a module that helps me with this, or how do I link to that library, or can I find a framework to leverage.

For that, you gotta be plugged in to the community, and because of that, you know that it's never spelled "PERL".

> Most of what I do when I program isn't about remembering
> the technical things about Perl. It's about finding
> answers to the things that aren't just about the
> language, like is there a module that helps me with
> this, or how do I link to that library, or can I find
> a framework to leverage.
>
> For that, you gotta be plugged in to the community, and
> because of that, you know that it's never spelled "PERL".

Oh come on. Why would someone who is "plugged in" to the community have to subscribe to every single belief? Judging someone based on how thye write the word is absurd and in reality, very few people actually really care that much.

And for the record, Larry Wall, in a 1999 Linux Magazine expressly stated that "Perl not only stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language", which is something many community regulars who argue against the usage of PERL actively ignore in order to make their points work at all.

They completely ignore that that meaning can be written as PERL, just as many people write TMTOWTDI instead of writing it out in full. And isn't the tabooifiing of "PERL" contrary to the core belief of TMTOWTDI?

I personally believe, dear anonymonk, that I've seen a pair of recent posts of yours in this thread, of which this is one. They both were heavily downvoted. I presume that the main reason why is that the thread itself is three years old: of course, threads never die, but people soon loose interest in them. So, if you really feel like addressing single posts in it, then you should clearly specify why it is so. (I did something similar not much time ago...) OTOH this particular subject matter has been discussed so many times that I feel like giving a little piece of advice to you. Namely, find all such occurrences: one that springs to mind is PERL as shibboleth and the Perl community. Then read all interventions there and if you still really feel like advocating your positions, then prepare a well thought essay detailing your arguments in favour or against previous claims on the subject.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other